
Hindsight Bias and its Application in Financial Investment, Legal Decisions, and Medical Diagnosis
- 1 Nord Anglia Chinese International School
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
This essay seeks to explicate hindsight bias as a pervasive cognitive heuristic and discusses its manifestation in everyday judgment and decision-making, incorporating the representative psychological factors that underlie different conceptual constructs. With the combination of theoretical frameworks with past contextualized experiments, three essential applications of hindsight bias in financial investment, legal decisions, and medical diagnosis, including their significance in society, are introduced respectively by extrapolation. Judgment concerning financial investment and economic outlook necessitate an unprejudiced future-centric perspective but is often susceptible to a biased retrospection that results in unwise decisions. Similarly, in the criminal justice system, hindsight bias may be responsible for numerous impartial decisions made, which would interfere with legal impartiality. In medical settings, people also have a habitual tendency to overestimate their diagnostic abilities, which may have negative implications for future therapeutic treatment. Finally, potential methods to ameliorate the influence of hindsight bias are suggested to guide more sound decisions and enhance societal efficiency.
Keywords
hindsight bias, finance, legal decisions, medical diagnosis
[1]. Pezzo, M. V. (2011). Hindsight bias: A primer for motivational researchers. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 5(9), 665-678.
[2]. Roese, N. J., & Vohs, K. D. (2012). Hindsight Bias. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(5), 411-426. doi:10.1177/1745691612454303.
[3]. Pohl, R. F., Bender, M., & Lachmann, G. (2002). Hindsight bias around the world. Experimental Psychology, 49(4), 270.
[4]. Hell, W., Gigerenzer, G., Gauggel, S., Mall, M., & Müller, M. (1988). Hindsight bias: An interaction of automatic and motivational factors?. Memory & Cognition, 16(6), 533-538.
[5]. Edgar Erdfelder and Axel Buchner. Decomposing the hindsight bias: A multinomial processing tree model for separating recollection and reconstruction in hindsight. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24(2):387, 1998.
[6]. Yopchick, J. E., & Kim, N. S. (2012). Hindsight bias and causal reasoning: A minimalist approach. Cognitive Processing, 13(1), 63-72.
[7]. Tykocinski, O. E., & Steinberg, N. (2005). Coping with disappointing outcomes: Retroactive pessimism and motivated inhibition of counterfactuals. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 41(5), 551-558.
[8]. Louie, T. A. (1999). Decision makers' hindsight bias after receiving favorable and unfavorable feedback. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84(1), 29.
[9]. Mahdavi, S., & Rahimian, M. A. (2017, August). Hindsight bias impedes learning. In Imperfect Decision Makers: Admitting Real-World Rationality (pp. 111-127). PMLR.
[10]. Biais, B., & Weber, M. (2009). Hindsight bias, risk perception, and investment performance. Management Science, 55(6), 1018-1029.
[11]. Hastie, R., Schkade, D. A., & Payne, J. W. (1999). Juror judgments in civil cases: Hindsight effects on judgments of liability for punitive damages. Law and Human Behavior, 23(5), 597–614.
[12]. Bodenhausen, G. V. (1990). Second‐Guessing the Jury: Stereotypic and Hindsight Biases in Perceptions of Court Cases 1. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 20(13), 1112-1121.
[13]. Stallard, M.J., & Worthington, D.L. (1998). Reducing the Hindsight Bias Utilizing Attorney Closing Arguments. Law and Human Behavior, 22, 671-683.
[14]. Arkes, H. R. (2013). The consequences of the hindsight bias in medical decision making. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(5), 356-360.
[15]. Arkes, H. R., Wortmann, R. L., Saville, P. D., & Harkness, A. R. (1981). Hindsight bias among physicians weighing the likelihood of diagnoses. Journal of Applied Psychology, 66(2), 252.
Cite this article
Fu,Y. (2023). Hindsight Bias and its Application in Financial Investment, Legal Decisions, and Medical Diagnosis. Advances in Economics, Management and Political Sciences,12,326-332.
Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
Disclaimer/Publisher's Note
The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s). EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.
About volume
Volume title: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Business and Policy Studies
© 2024 by the author(s). Licensee EWA Publishing, Oxford, UK. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Authors who
publish this series agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the series right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this
series.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the series's published
version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial
publication in this series.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and
during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See
Open access policy for details).